World at War

God has forsaken the world when mankind seems to have lost his humanity, and a hundred years later revolutions, betrayal, and wars both internal and spanning continents and centuries are tearing the world apart as man creates his own Hell on earth.
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Chapters:

The man walked through the streets slowly, his head bowed
solemnly. Grey smoke coiled and rolled around him, whispering
softly on the rubble-strewn pavement. Spirals of thicker black
smoke filtered out through the blank grey wall, hovering around
the man and the small party behind him. Flashes of bright orange
and gold erupted in the hazy dimness, sparking and flashing like
fireworks. A wry smile crossed the man's face, a bittersweet
smirk at the morbid irony.

The once proud buildings were hollow shells, with
gaping black windows and bits of broken glass trickling down like
soft rain. Soft chimes echoed when the shards shattered on the
sidewalk. Their eyes wide and glazed, the small crowd followed
behind the man, stepping over debris with unnatural ease,
ignorant of the small flames flickering around them.

Splayed on the streets, their limbs twisted
grotesquely and their lips cherry red, were hundreds of mangled
bodies. Mouths were half open in screams, eyes were half closed,
and some hands lay on the ground, grasping vainly for the cold
hand of their love. Empty eyes watched impassively as the man
moved through the city, heads lolling on limp necks and legs
stretched out in front of them. One woman lay curled up on
herself, her back charred and her dress burnt through, with the
fragile corpse of child tangled underneath her. A line of dried
blood ran from the corner of the child's pale lips, and small
flames flickering in the girl's sooty blonde hair. Ugly red burns
mutilated the girl's delicate features, twisting them into a
misshapen mask. Her small hands, with bits of raw red flesh and
bone visible under flaps of loose skin, were pressed against her
mother's stomach, as though she had been trying to push her
mother off her after her mother's death before dying of the
burns. The man looked away, a silent tear slipping down his face.

Ashes lay scattered thickly on the ground as the man
and his followers approached the center of the city. The
buildings were little more than rubble, ash, and teetering steel
support beams, and all that survived, other than the carpet of
dark ash swirling around his feet and the bone fragments
crunching under his boots, were sooty wristwatches and
half-melted wedding bands. Anyone this close to the center of the
charred starburst on the ground had been burnt to a crisp within
seconds. The ash was made chunky with scattered chunks of bone,
but so many bones seemed to have simply shattered, or been
crushed by massive chunks of debris into fine powder.

The man knew that there were survivors, stragglers
with dark eyes and vacant expressions farther from the center of
the city, but they would die off eventually from radiation
poisoning. They would be trapped by the same massive white
bubble, a government monstrosity encasing the entire city in
order to keep the radiation from escaping into the world, which
towered over the city. The bubble had begun to be raised within
seconds of the bombing by some FBI or CIA big shot in Washington,
D.C., or even the Commander in Chief himself, and had taken less
than an hour to be cover the entire city like a white fishbowl,
or a neon white sky, blindingly bright.

He stood in the center of the black starburst, where
no remains of a bomb remained, and turned to face the dutiful
group, forty strong, trailing behind him. The group, composed of
mostly younger people, men and women both, knelt and bowed their
heads. When they looked up at him, their eyes shown with love.
The radiation and smoke did not affect them whatsoever, as long
as they were with the man.

The man, no older than seventeen, ran a hand through
his mop of brown hair as he faced his followers. His green eyes,
flecked with brown and gold like a kaleidoscope, were dark and
distant under thick eyebrows. His features, simple but handsome,
were classically European, and his eyebrows were thick under the
fringe that just barely brushed his eyes. He pulled his white
jacket closer over the thin black T-shirt, suddenly cold, and
fingered the gold crucifix dangling around his neck. The puncture
marks in his wrists, large enough to stick a finger through, were
hidden by the sleeves of the jacket now, but he rolled them up to
reveal the holes in his arms, ringed by dry brown blood. The
scars of small scratches, white and almost invisible now, ringed
his head like a crown. Similar punctures in his ankles were
hidden by heavy black boots.

"My brothers and sisters," the man began, clearing
his throat. His voice was slightly musical, deeper than expected
from a slim man of only medium height, and he had a faint British
accent. "It was told to you, long ago, that the sinners would be
sent to Hell for their crimes against the Lord. Thousands of
years ago, Adam and Eve forsook their Eden and accepted sin.
Thousands of years ago, the Earth was flooded to purge it of sin.
Thousands of years ago, a sacrifice" (he fingered the crucifix
reverently, a strange expression coming across his face) "was
made to save man from Hell!"

His followers stayed kneeling on the ground, their
faces tearstained. Abigail, an emotional and empathetic girl of
only sixteen, was biting her lip to repress sobs.

"Hell was promised," the man continued, "for the
sinners after their deaths on earth. But now," he swept his hand
behind him, indicating both the ruined city and the world as a
whole, "Man has brought Hell to earth for himself. They say that
the Father is not real because he does not save them from the
devil. But even if the Lord could remove Satan entirely from
humanity, man would create a new Satan in his place, as they have
created a Hell to replace the paradise given to Adam and Eve!
Only you, the chosen, turn your back on this Hell of your own
creation, and so you shall be saved!"

The man approached Abigail, who turned her face up to
him. Her tearful eyes shown with joy. He kissed her on the browj,
and she faded, becoming first muted, then transparent, before
ceasing to exist at all.

Tristan, a boy of only fourteen, was next in line.
Innocent blue eyes peered up at the man from under honey blond
hair.

"What of the dead here?" he asked quietly, his eyes
sad.

"Worry not," muttered the man, kissing Tristan on the
brow. He too faded, as if he were a movie character using a green
screen. "They will be judged with mercy," the man whispered the
empty air.

"Less than Hell," replied the man, brushing his lips
on the crown of the boy's head, "and less than life." Simon too
faded away, becoming sepia toned, and then a ghost, and then he
was gone.

The man kissed every one of his followers on the
brow, offering words of comfort and accepting final prayers and
words of love. When Lara, the last to leave, had faded away, the
man turned to face the empty streets. Far in the distance, dark
shadows were beginning to stagger through the fog.

"Why send you to Hell" the man asked the empty
street, "when you create it for yourselves?"

The man clasped his cross and muttered his prayer,
fading away just as his followers had before him, but much more
slowly, inching his way toward transparency.